We moved to North Carolina from Florida in 2014 when my husband received a salaried position. We were newly engaged and I had just graduated with my Masters in Clinical Psychology. It was an exciting moment for us, filled with lots of changes. It turned out to be a harder transition than I anticipated and I was hit with the strongest home-sickness bug. It took awhile for me to adjust because I missed my family. But, after finding meaningful employment as a counselor, things looked up. We got married, then pregnant and we were in bliss.
But, things took a turn for the worst. Our daughter, Lucy, came extremely early at 26 weeks gestation (3.5 months too early). I never experienced my third trimester before having a traumatic birthing experience. [Read more here]
We spent a total of 148 days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). It was one of the hardest things I have had to go through. Our babygirl fought so hard to be here with us. She had to learn to breathe, to keep her heart pumping, to just live. During this time, I learned what it meant to be a mother, what it meant to fight, and even came close to losing it all at times.
It is difficult to put into words the amount of stress and overwhelming emotions that the NICU life entails, but I try to [here].
Life after the NICU has been a huge adjustment. It is as if we have had to learn to be parents all over, but a different kind of parent. Up until then, we were NICU parents, but now we had to be parent-parents. There was a lot of growing pains here, some almost costing us our marriage, some costing a whole lot of energy and heartache.
Our girl came home with oxygen, monitors, and a feeding tube–nothing what we expected when we first got pregnant. This also accompanied many doctors visits and therapies each week. Some weeks we had 6 appointments, and trying to fit all of this in with around-the-clock pumping and daily vomiting and feeding issues was exhausting. It was a lot to get used to but we did. We, as a family, survived thrived through it [read more about our life after the NICU here].
Our life has become quite hectic some days, changing by the hour. I have come to embrace this new chapter of parenthood, feeding tube and all. So I have learned to buckle in and live for the hour, by the hour.